Rene Descartes's motto challenges his would-be historians: "He lives well who hides well." He hid even in the Discourse on Method, where he professed to recount the story of his "entire life, " but said almost nothing about his childhood and youth. He mentioned neither family nor friends, and he boasted a total freedom from irrational passions. In the Discourse, which presented a new way of achieving certain truth through mathematical reason, Descartes stressed just one event, a day of thinking (...) at the beginning of winter, 1619. Tucked away in an unpublished notebook, however, Descartes also left the Olympica, which documented the wildly irrational dreams he had the night of November 10, 1619, and gave his own enthusiastic interpretations. Embarrassed scholars have tried to reason away this record and even the dreams themselves. Adapting clinical methods to historical research, John Cole offers the first systematic interpretation of the Olympian dreams. He argues that they expressed and masked Descartes's unresolved conflicts: his guilt at having rejected the law career for which he had been trained and which his lawyer father had wanted him to pursue, and his shame over early failures to satisfy the high expectations of his friend and mentor, Isaac Beeckman. Cole shows us how a critical historian can make sense of such irrational material and lets us see the creation of an egocentric and rationalist philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: An Environmental Ethic for Non‐Tree Huggers Considering the Environment by Riding a Bike Cycles of Climate Change Pollution The Cycling Solution The End of a (Subaru) Legacy Notes.

It appears that utilitarian arguments in favor of moral vegetarianism cannot justify a complete prohibition of eating meat. This is because, in certain circumstances, forgoing meat will prevent no pain, and so, on utilitarian grounds, we should be opportunistic carnivores rather than moral vegetarians. In his paper, ‘Puppies, pigs, and people: Eating meat and marginal cases,’ Alastair Norcross argues that causal impotence arguments like these are misguided. First, he presents an analogous situation, the case of chocolate mousse a-la-bama, in order (...) to argue that we, individually, are not causally impotent. Second, Norcross offers a threshold argument in which he argues that while we may individually be causally impotent, when we adopt moral vegetarianism in concert with others, we become causally potent in preventing harms by factory farming. We argue that Norcross's responses ultimately fail to address the causal impotence objection. The former argument fails because it vastly oversimplifies the world in which we find ourselves. Given the size of factory farming, the reasonable conclusion is that we are in fact powerless to prevent harms to animals in factory farms in many or most cases. The latter argument fails because even if collective action will have an impact on factory farming, this does not provide us with an argument against being carnivores in certain circumstances. (shrink)

There is a long history of philosophical intuition that the human mind must be more than physical or mechanical. I argue that this intuition arises from the perfect “transparency” of physical and mechanical states, in the sense that such states have no obscure or occult elements, but are fully intelligible in mathematical terms. In the paper, I derive a contradiction from the claim that such a physical system has genuine intentionality, comparable with an intelligent human. The contradiction arises from the (...) fact that, according to physicalism, the physical properties of a brain state determine the narrow propositional content of any conscious thought occurring in that state. This fact allows a physical property of brain states to be defined using Cantor’s diagonal construction, and then a contradiction results if a physical system is assumed to form thoughts involving that property. (shrink)

Clinical ethics committees (CECs) are well established in North America where they are known as hospital or health care ethics committees. Similar groups and other kinds of clinical ethics support are now developing in Europe. This supplement to the Journal of Medical Ethics provides an overview of the issues arising from the provision of clinical ethics support services, and clinical ethics committees in particular. Its primary focus is the UK but contributors from North America and continental Europe provide an international (...) perspective. Clinical ethics committees are an emerging feature of UK health care. This supplement's first paper provides an overview of the current provision of clinical ethics support in the UK and an assessment of the way in which CECs are developing. Personal perspectives from five UK CECs provide insight into some of the issues that those considering setting up a committee in their …. (shrink)

Epistemic theories of objective chance hold that chances are idealised epistemic probabilities of some sort. After giving a brief history of this approach to objective chance, I argue for a particular version of this view, that the chance of an event E is its epistemic probability, given maximal knowledge of the possible causes of E. The main argument for this view is the demonstration that it entails all of the commonly-accepted properties of chance. For example, this analysis entails that chances (...) supervene on the physical facts, that the chance function is an expert probability, that the existence of stable frequencies results from invariant chances in repeated experiments, and that chances are probably close to long-run relative frequencies in repeated experiments. Despite these virtues, epistemic approaches to chance have been neglected in recent decades, on account of their conflict with accepted views about closely related topics such as causation, laws of nature, and epistemic probability. However, existing views on these topics are also very problematic, and I believe that the epistemic view of chance is a key piece of this puzzle that, once in place, allows all the other pieces to fit together into a new and coherent way. I also respond to some criticisms of the epistemic theory that I favour. (shrink)

In a random process, later events seem to be loosely attached to earlier ones; in other words, a substantial or tight relationship between the two is missing. This relationship is sometimes held to be the relation of cause and effect, so that random events are not caused by what preceded them. Richard Johns, however, adopts the original stance that random events are fully caused and lack only determination by their causes; according to his causal theory of chance, the physical (...) chance of an event is the degree to which the event is determined by its causes. -/- A Theory of Physical Probability addresses an important and, until now, poorly comprehended topic: chance, or physical probability. It puts forth Johns's theory of physical chance and demonstrates the implications of this theory in various areas of physics. Johns's is a novel approach to a fundamental topic in such disciplines as philosophy, philosophy of science, and physics, and it will be widely admired by scholars for its clarity and accessibility. (shrink)

SummaryThis paper explicates a Constructivist Epistemology which underlies cybernetic models of perceiving and knowing. We focus on the recent work of W. T. Powers . Powers' model consists of hierarchially arranged negative feedback systems, is based on the claim that living organisms behave to control perceptions, and thus suggests that organisms construct their experiential world. We argue that this provides a basis for a modified scientific scepticism, a scepticism with a positive dimension gained by adding the notion of cognitive construction. (...) From this perspective, knowing and perceiving pertain to the construction of invariances in the living organism's experience.RésuméDans cet essai, nous exposons une épistémologie constructivistc qui sert de base pour des modèles cybernétiques de la perception et de la connaissancc. Nous nous référonts à l'œuvre de W. T. Powers qui a propose un modèle constitué par un arrangement hiérarchique de boucles rétroactives en partant de l'idée que tout comportement a pour but de contrôler les perceptions. Ce modèle suggère que le monde expérientiel est le produit d'une activité constructive. Nous défendons la thèse que cette orientation peut fournir le fondement d'un scepticisme scientifique qui acquiert un aspect positif par la notion de construction cognitive. De ce point de vue, connaissance et perception sont des activités qui construisent des invariances dans l'expérience d'un organisme.ZusammenfassungIn der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine konstruktivistische Erkenntnistheorie entwickelt, die ihrerseits gewissen kybernetischen Modeller) der Wahrnehmurtg und Er‐kenntnis zugrundeliegt. Wir beziehen uns auf die Untersuchungen von W. T. Powers , dessen Modell aus hierarchisch angeordneten Rückkopplungssystemen besteht und auf der Annahme be‐ruht, dass das Verhalten von Lebewesen der Regelung von Wahrnehmungcn dicnt. Powers legt deshalb die Hypothese nahe, dass Organismen ihre Erlebenswelt konstru‐iren. Wir vertreten die Ansicht, dass diese die Grundlage für einen neuen wisscnschaftli‐chen Skeptizismus liefert, der auf Grund des Begriffes der kognitiven Konstruktion eine positive Dimension gewinnt. Von diesem Gesichtspunkt aus betrachtet betreffen Wissen und Wahrnehmung den aktiven Aufbau von Konstanten in der Erlebenswelt des Orga‐nismus. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a mathematical basis for the plausible idea that regular dynamical laws can only produce (quickly and reliably) regular structures. Thus the actual laws, which are regular, can only produce regular objects, like crystals, and not irregular ones, like living organisms.

There is presently considerable interest in the phenomenon of "self-organisation" in dynamical systems. The rough idea of self-organisation is that a structure appears "by itself in a dynamical system, with reasonably high probability, in a reasonably short time, with no help from a special initial state, or interaction with an external system. What is often missed, however, is that the standard evolutionary account of the origin of multi-cellular life fits this definition, so that higher living organisms are also products of (...) self-organisation. Very few kinds of object can selforganise, and the question of what such objects are like is a suitable mathematical problem. Extending the familiar notion of algorithmic complexity into the context of dynamical systems, we obtain a notion of "dynamical complexity". A simple theorem then shows that only objects of very low dynamical complexity can self organise, so that living organisms must be of low dynamical complexity. On the other hand, symmetry considerations suggest that living organisms are highly complex, relative to the dynamical laws, due to their large size and high degree of irregularity. In particular, it is shown that since dynamical laws operate locally, and do not vary across space and time, they cannot produce any specific large and irregular structure with high probability in a short time. These arguments suggest that standard evolutionary theories of the origin of higher organisms are incomplete. (shrink)

What I’m calling “Subjective Logic” is a new approach to logic. Fundamentally it is a theory about what sentences mean, i.e. a theory of the proposition, but it includes an account of logical consequence, the propositional connectives, probability, and the nature of truth.

The Luck Argument seems to show that libertarianism is false, since indeterministic free will is impossible. We should be wary of this argument, however, since a very similar argument shows that indeterministic causation1 is impossible. Further, since chancy events require causes, but are not determined, it would also follow that chancy events do not exist. If we are to conclude that free actions are all deterministic (or nonexistent), then the same reasoning should also persuade us that events with physical chances (...) do not exist. The Luck Argument, in its various formulations, assumes that a human being, like any physical system, has a set of complete (or exact, or precise) possible states. The same assumption drives the similar argument against indeterministic causation. This spells disaster for both free actions and chancy events, as these require causes. The assumption that physical systems have precise states should therefore be subjected to the closest scrutiny, which is not usually the case. On the contrary, it enjoys a wide and uncritical acceptance. (shrink)